


This Rhapsody of Life

by Lion_owl



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Backstory, Episode: s6e12 Who Mourns For Morn?, Gen, Lurian culture, Morn backstory, Pre-Canon, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 20:42:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13256238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lion_owl/pseuds/Lion_owl
Summary: Crown prince? Ascension to the throne? No, all young Morn wanted was to lead a quiet life robbing banks and sleeping with people not considered appropriate suitors by his family





	This Rhapsody of Life

**Author's Note:**

> i always loved the idea that morn actually was the crown prince and hain was partially telling the truth 
> 
> pinch hit for tumblr user [graybeats](http://graybeats.tumblr.com) for the [star trek secret santa](http://startreksecretsanta.tumblr.com), finally i've found someone who shares my interest in Morn's backstory. title from [this](https://genius.com/Within-temptation-covered-by-roses-lyrics)

Morn remembers the first person he slept with; it was his first attendance of the annual festival in his home village.

On the tenth day he met Sala, a young man visiting from Trill to join in the festivities. They’d spent the next three days together, eating Kroffa beans, learning songs of the Old Ways from the Elders of the Mountains, and those three nights, brushing each others’ hair and discovering each other’s bodies.

It wasn’t love, but it was the closest Morn had ever come to understanding the concept at that point.

His parents were livid when they found out.

“How can the people respect the Gheljiar when its young ones are seen engaging in such frivolous behaviour?” his first mother had demanded of him. His second mother had said nothing, but the look of shame in her eyes told him enough.

~

Sala wasn’t at the festival the following year, and Morn had felt he should be relieved: he wouldn’t have to disappoint his family again. He ate Kroffa beans with his siblings.

On the eighth night, he received a letter. Sala had gotten engaged to another Trill.

~

In his third year, Morn didn’t attend. He brushed his own hair in the reflection pool in his antechamber.

~

In his fifth year he met Yaron, who was from another village. She was in her seventh year of the festival, and she had travelled to his village because she had heard a rumour about the way they did things here, and wanted to see if it was true.

He fell for her. His mothers weren’t best pleased, but at least she was another Lurian, they reasoned, someone who could join the Gheljiar if that was the way Morn’s thoughts lay.

He’d argued with his third mother and eldest sibling that night. Why should he be restricted to marrying a Lurian when there were plenty of precedents otherwise, outside the royal family, and nobody cared. Maybe he didn’t want to marry another Lurian.

Yaron overheard him, and she left without a word.

~

All the talk was that someone had stolen eighteen bricks of gold-pressed latinum from the local storage unit. Everyone wanted to know who was responsible and the conspiracy theories flew back and forth.

Nobody suspected the Crown Prince, and anyone who did dared not say anything.

Morn was safe, and so were his ninth and thirteenth siblings as they each took six bricks and stashed them away.

They watched from the balcony as an innocent person was sentenced to evening servitude at the docks as punishment for a crime they didn’t commit.

~

This wasn’t fair.

Morn lay in his mud bed that night, unable to achieve rest.

He felt guilty for the one who bore his punishment, of course he did, but he felt like he himself were also being punished, punished by the cruel lottery of birth that had condemned him to a lift of royalty and public service.

And what was the gain?

In many other cultures he’d learned about, being a member of a ruling family meant you were richer than everyone else.

Not on Luria, where all five thousand citizens had an identical wealth.

Freedom to do as he pleased?

Certainly not. He thought of Sala, thought of Yaron, thought of the thrill he’d felt being with them without his family’s approval; thought of robbing the storage bank, the thrill he’d felt breaking the rules that state you mustn’t take what isn’t explicitly yours.

He considered breaking the innocent out of prison, but that would only lead to they and their family being forced into exile. The deed was already done.

~

In his fourteenth year, he was given his own space vehicle; a modestly-sized shuttlecraft. He took it to other worlds where he could be less secretive about his affairs, where nobody knew him and he could go about his life without a fuss.

One night in a pub, he met a less than reputable man named Krit, who introduced him to his brother, Nahsk.

~

His mothers would not approve of his business enterprising, so he kept it under the radar. He wouldn’t say he trusted many of his associates, but he turned a tidy profit and he felt like he was living.

While his second sibling studied the history of the Gheljiar, Morn found company with people from species from all over the quadrant, and returned with fabricated tales of what he’d been doing.

~

It was his nineteenth year at the festival, and a special celebration was being prepared. You see, between the nineteenth and twentieth years, the Crown Prince was to take his place on the Gheljiar council and begin his royal duties.

Not a happy prospect for Morn.

He would have to sell the businesses his parents didn’t know that he had and he would have to marry.

Not so long ago had a Betazoid named Kamile entered his life. They described him as a ‘free spirit’; they said that like them, Morn was not suited to a life tied down something as mundane as a Royal council.

They shared his own bed with him, unlike many he had met who had strangely had an aversion to sleeping and loving in a gloopy liquid, and evidently didn’t share the benefit it gave him of clearing his mind and freshening his skin.

Kamile found it amusing that Lurians slept in what they described as ‘mud’, but it didn’t bother them. Morn liked Kamile, and was sorely tempted when they asked him to renounce his title and leave with them. He knew they would not stick around with him forever, but Morn was fine with that. He didn’t care for marriage.

~

Nahsk approached him three nights before the ceremony. He hadn’t spoken to the man in a number of years now, but Nahsk claimed he had a job for him, were he interested.

There were four so far: the brothers Nahsk and Krit, a woman named Larell and a man named Hain. They needed a fifth member of their group in order to carry out their plans, and they reckoned Morn was just the person for the job.

They wanted him to help them rob the central bank on Lissepia.

They planned to carry it out next year, during the hundredth anniversary of the Great Mother’s Return and the extravagant celebrations it entailed.

~

On his way back to Luria, he made a call at Terok Nor, a space station in the Cardassian-occupied Bajoran sector. It was just meant to be a pit stop, to refuel his ship and his belly and give him a little extra time to mull over Larell’s offer.

It became so much more when he stepped over the threshold of an establishment called ‘Quark’s Bar and Grill’. He wasn’t much one for the dark, hot environment that Cardassians preferred, and he wasn’t exactly enamoured with the way they treated the people they had subjugated, but despite all that, Quark’s gave off a vibe that Morn thought he could get used to.

The proprietor, a Ferengi who was rumoured to be selling food to Bajorans at close to cost but denied it and laughed in Morn’s face when he was asked, thought the mop of black hair sticking out of Morn’s head at every angle and trailing all the way down his back, was hilarious, and unaware of the intimate significance of hair in Lurian culture, asked to touch it.

That was when Morn unloaded his entire life story on the poor, unsuspecting man.

~

His mothers were furious.

At first they thought he was joking, but the laughter quickly dissipated as soon as it became clear that he wasn’t – that his intention to relinquish his Royal Claims was a serious one that he had properly thought through.

There were lectures about how he was letting them down, lectures about how he was throwing his life away, lectures about how he was better than this, and then he was sent to clean out the council room to think about what they had said, but those several hours of polishing the surfaces and sweeping the floors only strengthened his resolve.

His second sibling was only a year behind him, and could take his place.

The next day he sent a subspace message to Larell and Nahsk, confirming he would help them with the heist.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you like it! please let me know what you think in the comments
> 
> find me on [tumblr](http://lionowlonao3.tumblr.com)


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